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Microsoft boss Satya Nadella has reportedly raked in more than $1 billion in compensation at the company – a personal fortune bolstered by the tech giant’s prescient investment in OpenAI’s ChatGPT tool.
Bloomberg calculated Nadella’s windfall by tallying his salary, bonuses, stock dividends and equity grants that were disclosed in Microsoft’s public regulatory filings.
He earned nearly $55 million in 2022 alone.
The 55-year-old’s earnings bonanza has coincided with a period of massive success for Microsoft’s stock since Nadella took over as CEO in 2014.
Shares have risen more than 1,000% over that period, including a surge of nearly 50% since the start of this year.
Microsoft spokesperson Frank Shaw pushed back on the report, telling Bloomberg that Nadella “does not have net worth of a billion dollars or more.”
Shaw reportedly declined further comment on the matter.
Microsoft did not immediately return The Post’s request for comment.
The majority of Nadella’s purported $1 billion windfalls is derived from equity grants tied to performance and service time.
The report said Nadella has “periodically sold some of his shares” in the company and gifted $20 million in stock to undisclosed beneficiaries.
In January, Microsoft notably invested $10 billion in OpenAI, whose ChatGPT tool has exploded in popularity due to its ability to generate human-like response to a wide variety of user prompts.
The investment is widely seen as having given Microsoft a leg up on rivals such as Google parent Alphabet in the race to develop advanced AI tools.
Microsoft has integrated OpenAI’s ChatGPT technology with its Bing search engine.
Nadella has worked at Microsoft since 1992, raising to the level of executive vice president of its cloud division before replacing company legend and billionaire Steve Ballmer as CEO in 2014.
Bloomberg noted that Nadella has reached rarified status among tech executives who have personally benefitted from the sector’s boom over the last decade.
The report stated that Apple CEO Tim Cook had become a billionaire roughly nine years after he became the iPhone maker’s top executive.
Elsewhere, Google CEO Sundar Pichai is among the industry’s big winners, having earned payouts that topped $200 million on three separate occasions thanks to a lucrative stock-based compensation plan.
The massive CEO paydays have rankled some tech industry workers as major companies enacted sweeping layoffs and other cost-cutting measures over the last year.
In June, Microsoft workers reportedly criticized Nadella for touting the company’s “landmark year” months after slashing 10,000 jobs.
Source by [New York Post]